Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing has released the cover for “Shoot­ing Scars,” the sec­ond book in the Artists Tril­ogy, which will be released on August 20th, 2013. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Get the first four books in the Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Series for just $3!

Dark­house is FREE: http://www.amazon.com/Darkhouse-Experiment-Terror-1-ebook/dp/B0050Q6HQK/ref=pd_sim_kstore_26

Red Fox is 99 cents: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Fox-Experiment-Terror-ebook/dp/B0055PJFA6/ref=pd_sim_kstore_7

Dead Sky Morn­ing is 99 cents: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Morning-Experiment-Terror-ebook/dp/B005VB5BIO/ref=pd_sim_kstore_3

Lying Sea­son is 99 cents: http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Season-Experiment-Terror-ebook/dp/B006LEWJWQ/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1

THEN get on board with the EIT Read­ing Chal­lenge lead­ing up to the June 23rd release of Book #7, COME ALIVE

Hey, so to kick off The Artists Tril­ogy going from indie-published to traditionally-published, Natasha is a Book Junkie is host­ing one fan­tas­tic give­away (also a great rea­son to snap up Sins & Nee­dles and On Every Street for just 99 cents). This only runs till June 4th, the date that Hachette takes over, so get on it while you can!

Click here to enter: http://www.natashaisabookjunkie.com/2013/05/31/giveaway-the-artists-trilogy/

In prepa­ra­tion for the upcom­ing Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror book, Come Alive (#7) on June 23rd, I thought I would do a give­away. Cuz, hello, more Dex com­ing at you!

You can win a signed copy of the novel­las And With Mad­ness Comes the Light AND On Every Street (from The Artists Tril­ogy), plus two magnets.

The con­test is open inter­na­tion­ally and will run until Fri­day May 31st!

TO ENTER you must pro­vide your favorite Dex quote below. If you do not have one, please tell me why you’d like to get to know Dex Foray. Com­ments are being mod­er­ated because of sneaky spam, so your com­ment won’t show up right away but I’ll still be able to see it, so don’t worry.

Good luck!

********ONCE AGAIN — TO ENTER YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR FAVORITE DEX QUOTE — OR IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE SERIES YET (AND YOU SHOULD GET ON THAT, btw) — TELL ME WHY YOU’D LIKE TO GET TO KNOW DEX FORAY. If you just thank me for the give­away, it’s not enough. You must com­ment on one of those two spe­cific things. Put your ass into it, you know? Thank you! *************

Here’s the thing. I’m pretty good about let­ting some things slide — you kinda have to be when you’re a writer. I mean, hello, just look at any bad review. If some­one doesn’t like what you’ve writ­ten, there’s lit­tle you can do you change their mind. So let it go (eas­ier said than done, of course, but I’ve had practice).

But, when peo­ple have the wrong infor­ma­tion or the wrong idea about some­thing, well that’s a dif­fer­ent story. I have to put things right.

Ever since I announced that Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing was push­ing back the release date of Shoot­ing Scars to August 20th, I’ve got­ten a hell of a lot of back­lash. This was to be expected  - in fact I voiced this con­cern to my edi­tor and she under­stood. But this was their deci­sion, not mine and I stand by them because I believe they know what they’re doing (read to the end to find out what that is) and HELL they are MY pub­lish­ers. This is my dream! Of course, they don’t deal with the backlash…I do.

And, frankly, in some cases like on Face­book or Goodreads, it’s been a bit…harsh. Like, you want to hurt me kind of harsh (and I am a fairly del­i­cate flower, so…)

Look, I under­stand being dis­ap­pointed. I’M dis­ap­pointed. I’m used to the “press pub­lish” method of self-publishing just as you’re all used to “one-click” buy­ing. I’m used to fin­ish­ing a book, edit­ing it, pub­lish­ing it. I’m a very fast writer and a very fast pub­lisher and I like to get things out to you as soon as pos­si­ble (hence why I’ve pub­lished thir­teen books in two years). But, this isn’t how the real pub­lish­ers do things. They take their time (and this is a good thing).

So you can be dis­ap­pointed all you want and I’m right there with you. I GET IT! You can cry and scream and be sad about the book being pushed back and I’ll cry and be sad, too. Honestly.

But, and here’s where things get tricky; I’ve noticed some peo­ple get­ting really angry and some false infor­ma­tion about me going around. Most notably, that I’m in charge of Shoot­ing Scars release date, that I some­how have the power over the dates and that it’s my fault the book is pushed back– in short, I’m doing this on purpose.

I am not an ass­hole. I swear.

I like to think of myself as a fairly engag­ing and gen­er­ous author. Aside from try­ing to pub­lish a lot of books for peo­ple to enjoy, I also host a looooooot of give­aways. I try and answer all my emails. I pro­vide teasers. I give away ARCs (essen­tially FREE books) to a boat­load of peo­ple and not all of them blog­gers. Some of them just ordi­nary peo­ple who love to read.

I try and keep peo­ple happy because read­ers are my every­thing. So it breaks my heart when peo­ple get the idea that I’m doing this to piss peo­ple off or to just fuck with peo­ple or I don’t care about my read­ers or I don’t know what.

Does that sound like some­thing I would do? Look, I’ve pushed back release dates on my self-published books before and I’ve admit­ted it. I said “hey you know what, Come Alive is going to be pub­lished in June because I’m bump­ing up Shoot­ing Scars till May.” I got some back­lash on that too, but at least that was fair — I was in charge of the dates. It was in my con­trol. That’s what self-publishing is all about.

But Shoot­ing Scars is NOT a self-published book. The Artists Tril­ogy, start­ing June when GCP For­ever releases it under their name, is no longer self-published. It started out that way but was bought by a big ass big six pub­lisher (see: my dream), some­thing I always wanted for this series. Now my series can go beyond the 30K peo­ple who have bought a copy (thank you!) and now hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple might get hooked on the Ellie/Camden/Javier train through Grand Cen­tral Publishing’s skilled hands. They can reach faaaaar more peo­ple than I ever could on my own.

Because it is not self-published, I do not con­trol the release dates. I am just the writer. AND I LIKE IT. It’s fuck­ing NICE to be able to just write and not worry about any­thing (except piss­ing off peo­ple, appar­ently). I don’t have to man­age the release, I don’t have to plan the pub­lic­ity attack. I don’t have to find an edi­tor and a cover and for­mat the book. They do it all for me. That is the num­ber one draw of going with a pub­lisher (that and see­ing your book in book­stores everywhere).

I’m excited!

I just wish my read­ers were excited too. I know push­ing back the release dates have made the excite­ment lev­els drop and I hope to bal­ance them out with more give­aways and post­ing whole chap­ters and more teasers closer to the release date. I know it’s tough to wait for a book. In fact, if I could go back in time I would have stuck to the orig­i­nal release date for Shoot­ing Scars, which was July. Yup. I was first going to pub­lish it in July, but then I saw so many peo­ple upset over the cliffhanger and bumped it up to May. I hate dis­ap­point­ing peo­ple, but what can you do…

I hope that cleared things up, or at least made you real­ize I am not doing this, it is out of my hands. My read­ers mean every­thing to me (as I blogged about before, the rea­son I went with Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing is because the release date for SS was going to be in the sum­mer and the third book would be pub­lished in 2013 as well.…most other pub­lish­ers would spread the series out more and push it back by a year — I was not going to sign any deal that would do that). I would never push­back the release date if I could help it.

Now, I must go back to writ­ing Shoot­ing Scars. Since I signed the deal, the dead­line got extended by two weeks so I’m still plow­ing through it.

**** For those inter­ested in the pub­lish­ing process, here’s why the real rea­son why the release got pushed back *****

Pub­lish­ing houses have a sched­ule of books to be released. This sched­ule is usu­ally made a YEAR in advance, at least. Remem­ber, self-published books going to tra­di­tional is a VERY new thing. Nor­mally, books are cho­sen through agents. The agent sub­mits the author’s work to the edi­tors, they look it over, and if they like it, they make a deal. The book then goes through a VERY long edit­ing process and a very long cover process and a very long mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Mary Sue’s book “Vam­pire boyfriend” would be sub­mit­ted to the pub­lish­ers and a year or two later the book would finally come out. You know how they work…look at any trilo­gies, like Diver­gent. Roth signed the deal for those books at least a year before they were pub­lished. And all the book releases are spaced a year apart.

Pub­lish­ing houses are slooooooow.

So let’s look at GCP. They prob­a­bly have a sched­ule all set for book releases this year. They can’t all release their books on the same days (always a Tues­day) because they won’t be able to donate as much mar­ket­ing time. They want every book to have their moment in the sun. So they space them out — this thriller here, this romance there. It’s been set like that at least a year in advance (remem­ber the major­ity of the books are tra­di­tion­ally pub­lished and are still going through the stages).

Then I come along. They want my books. They want to sell Sins and OES and mar­ket them. Nor­mally, a pub­lish­ing house would say “okay, let’s release Sins in June and then OES over Christ­mas. THEN Shoot­ing Scars the fol­low­ing June and since we are feel­ing gen­er­ous, the third book in Xmas 2014″- they want to donate as MUCH time as pos­si­ble into mar­ket­ing the shit out of Sins before the release the other books. Remem­ber, I’ve sold X amount already — they need to make their pur­chase of the books worth­while. They need to reach peo­ple too.

But GCP, god bless them, said, “Hey we’ll release Sins and OES in June, and then spend June and July mar­ket­ing them, then release Shoot­ing Scars in July and then book#3 in Octo­ber.” And then they are like SHIT…we have SO many books lined up for July, that it wouldn’t be fair for Mary Sue’s “Vam­pire Boyfriend” a book that’s been made ready for a year, to sud­denly get the shaft. We’ve devoted so much time and money to it already.

So then they say, okay, well if we won’t move Vam­pire Boyfriend, then we’ll move Shoot­ing Scars since we just bought it. It’s just a month. Peo­ple will under­stand. And that way, instead of try­ing to mar­ket both those books at the same time, we can give Vam­pire Boyfriend the spot­light and then the next month do the same for Shoot­ing Scars.

And that’s what hap­pened. Shoot­ing Scars got moved to August 20th because it was the bet­ter date for both them and I. Book #3 got moved to Octo­ber 15th for the same reason.

There was no spite here. Noth­ing mali­cious. It’s just the way they work and it’s 100% out of my con­trol. I am a new-ish author with a mod­est (by their stan­dards) amount of suc­cess who has never had a pub­lish­ing deal before. They are a big pub­lish­ing cor­po­ra­tion who have been doing this for decades. I trust them.

And I hope you trust me.

<3

 

 

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way.

I know I said Shoot­ing Scars was com­ing out in July, but it just got pushed back to August 20th. Why? Grand Cen­tral Publishing’s team felt they could do me and the book bet­ter jus­tice this way and donate more man­power to pub­lic­ity. It’s a pretty good rea­son that I think will ben­e­fit every­one in the end.

They know that you, the read­ers, will be dis­ap­pointed by this news and they want to appease you (and me!). I will be work­ing with GCP’s pub­lic­ity depart­ment to come up with some treats for you — maybe along the lines of post­ing the first chap­ter to soften that Sins cliffhanger blow? Maybe giv­ing away THREE Cam­den bracelets in this blog post? Well, that’s not a maybe…I’m going to per­son­ally do it, so keep read­ing to enter.

So there you go. August 20th is the offi­cial release date of Shoot­ing Scars (will be on Nook as well as Ama­zon and all the major e-retailers at the same time).

Book #3 Bold Tricks (work­ing title) is being released on Octo­ber 15th. Hey, just a two-month wait!

Sins & Nee­dles and On Every Street will both be taken over by the pub­lish­ers next month in early June. This ALSO means that On Every Street will finally be avail­able on Nook at that time.

Once again, I’m sorry to dis­ap­point you with this push­back but there’s obvi­ously very lit­tle that I can do about it. The pub­lish­ers said they’d try to get it pub­lished in July but some­times things don’t work out and they are try­ing to get things to work in my favor.

So, please, keep that in mind. It actu­ally hurts my soul to see read­ers being upset with me over this or upset in gen­eral. Your sup­port for me and my new pub­lish­ers is MUCH appreciated.

Mean­while, here’s the NEW cover for Sins & Needles.

Yup! It’s pretty much the same, except white font and my name is ridicu­lously big. So happy they kept the cover, I love it!

Have you missed all the teasers I’ve posted about Shoot­ing Scars so far? Take a look:

Back to the first “I want to make you happy” give­away. Three Cam­den bracelets here. I just got them today and am really happy with them!

The win­ners will receive one of these as well as a signed sur­prise goody! To enter, just leave a com­ment below and on May 14th (the date I hand in Shoot­ing Scars to my edi­tor!) and I’ll pick three win­ners. Open internationally!

I’m going to try and keep this short and sweet, like the Oscar accep­tance speeches are expected to be – but like them, don’t be sur­prised if I drone on and on and am cut off by the music.

I have accepted an offer by a major “Big Six” pub­lisher for The Artists Tril­ogy, which includes On Every Street, Sins & Nee­dles, Shoot­ing Scars and Bold Tricks (the ten­ta­tively titled last book). All books will be pub­lished this year in e-book for­mat and late 2014 in mass mar­ket paperback.

*con­fetti gun goes off*

This is THE dream of all dreams for me. I wrote my first novel in 2009 (Dark­house, EIT #1) and self-published it on May 13, 2011 (after a few more books were writ­ten). Since then, I have writ­ten and pro­moted 13 books and I NEVER ever thought this day would come. I always felt like my writ­ing was unno­ticed and under­ap­pre­ci­ated. I felt like the geeky kid who can’t sit at the cool kids table (and I still feel like this). I felt like the val­i­da­tion I needed, wanted, craved was always out of my hands, a dream belong­ing to some­one else.

I felt like this for two years. But I per­se­vered. I kept writ­ing, kept try­ing to do my best. I sac­ri­ficed sleep, friends, a social life, fit­ting into my clothes, spend­ing qual­ity time with fam­ily, exer­cise, trav­el­ing, EVERYTHING. I invested money in it that, for the longest time, I NEVER saw come back. I felt like a lone sol­dier, just work­ing her ass off, some­times while hold­ing down a day job and some­times while work­ing 10 hour days of just writ­ing until my brain started to bleed. It’s been hard. It’s been tough. No one ever said being an indie author was easy but I never thought it would be SO hard. I never thought I would lose so much in pur­suit of my dream.

But, slowly, even­tu­ally, after about a year and a half of sell­ing 0–20 copies of my books a month, some­thing changed. Thanks to blog­gers like Maryse, The Book­ish Babes and For­ever Young Adult, and the hard­core fans who have been there since the start, peo­ple started to notice Dex and Perry and Exper­i­ment in Terror.

And after they noticed that, they noticed Sage and Dawn from The Devil’s Metal.

And then they noticed Ellie and Cam­den (and Javier) and Sins & Needles.

And pub­lish­ers noticed it too.

So, finally, I feel like all my hard work is finally being rec­og­nized, finally pay­ing off. I’ve made my friends proud of me (they can point to the books when they come out in book­stores and say, “I know that dork!”), I’ve made my par­ents proud of me (they can tell their friends that their daugh­ter is “actu­ally” pub­lished, since the older gen­er­a­tion doesn’t really get the whole self-pubbing thing and our fam­ily over­seas will be able to pick up MY BOOKS at the air­ports), I’ve made my fiancé proud of me (who has seen me strug­gle for far too long) and I’ve made ME proud of me. Because I made it – I finally did it. I got a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing deal. My books will be in book­stores every­where in 2014. I will have the back­ing of a huge cor­po­ra­tion and edi­tors who believe in me. I am PROUD of myself and all the blood that went into it.

But…and here was the ques­tion that always nagged at me since the begin­ning of nego­ti­a­tions – would my READERS be proud of me?

You see, dear read­ers, I was ter­ri­fied of telling you this. Because every­one knows now that books get pushed back when a pub­lisher takes them on. And from some of the angry com­ments I had already received from  peo­ple who hated the way Sins & Nee­dles ended, I knew I was going to make a lot of peo­ple mad at me. They weren’t going to be happy for me. They wouldn’t be proud. They would be upset that Shoot­ing Scars got pushed back from May and noth­ing else would matter.

So, I kept that thought at the fore­front of nego­ti­a­tions. If the book was going to be delayed more than I thought nec­es­sary, I wouldn’t sign the deal.

I’ll repeat: I would rather give up my dream than majorly dis­ap­point and anger my readers.

Thank­fully, it didn’t have to be that way. The pub­lisher under­stood how impor­tant it was to get Shoot­ing Scars out there. They didn’t want to delay it for the sake of delay­ing it (even though it does ben­e­fit them to do so). They under­stood. They are awe­some like that.

And so I said yes.

So here it is:

Shoot­ing Scars is get­ting delayed until July 2013 (iron­i­cally, that was the orig­i­nal release date I picked for the book before I moved it up to May). It’s just two months. It could have been a lot worse. It was the best I can do and believe me, that was the lat­est I would allow it to be pushed back.

On the plus side: the book will stay around the same price of Sins & Nee­dles (def­i­nitely indie-priced) AND the final book in the series will be pub­lished sooner than I had orig­i­nally planned. I was think­ing Novem­ber for Bold Tricks but it appears to be bumped up to Sep­tem­ber. So yes, more wait­ing in the short-term but less wait­ing in the long-term.

Now I know some of you are angry and I’ve been wait­ing for the retal­i­a­tion. And I under­stand the dis­ap­point­ment. I really do! I wish it could come out in May, too (though this does give me more time to work on it and make it amaz­ing). But as another author said to me, the true fans will wait. They will under­stand. And they will be proud of what you’ve accomplished.

I hope you’re all just as proud as I am

PS — Come Alive, the 7th Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror book is still com­ing out in June (mid-month it seems). I WILL have lots of awe­somely awe­some TAT (The Artists Tril­ogy) give­aways and swag plus lots of teasers to keep you game.

PPS I am doing a LOT of book sign­ings this year — there’s RT in May, Maryse’s Book Bash in Orlando in June. There’s an east coast sign­ing or two (or three) later on. Even one in the desert. Since I will soon have to pull my paper­backs of Sins & Nee­dles and On Every Street very soon — and the paper­backs from the pub­lisher won’t be out till next year — I advise you to buy them from Ama­zon now, while you can.

Link to Sins & Nee­dles paperback

Link to On Every Street paperback

PPS I will let you know the name of the pub­lisher once the ink on the con­tract has dried

<3

 

Paper­back copies of On Every Street are now avail­able from Cre­ate­Space, and later this week, Amazon.

These paper­backs won’t be avail­able for very long, same goes for Sins & Nee­dles, so if you haven’t bought a paper­back copy yet, I would strongly advise you to do so or for­ever hold your peace

Link to On Every Street Paper­backs — Createspace

Link to Sins & Nee­dles Paper­back — Createspace

Link to Sins & Nee­dles Paper­back — Amazon

I know June is a long ways off (at least it might feel that way to some peo­ple — not me!) but since I *sorta* leaked the cover to this at the Boston Author Event, I fig­ured I should make it official.

And with­out fur­ther ado, here is the cover for Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror #7 — Come Alive:

Blurb:

It’s one thing to bring the woman you love back into your life. It’s another to try and keep her there. For Dex Foray, con­vinc­ing Perry Palomino to open her­self to their bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship has been more chal­leng­ing than hunt­ing ghosts, bat­tling demons and stalk­ing Sasquatch com­bined. Add in the fact that the only way they can keep their Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror show run­ning is to take on a third part­ner in the form of the mys­te­ri­ous Max­imus Jacobs — all while inves­ti­gat­ing a sin­is­ter voodoo sect in New Orleans — and you’ve got the per­fect South­ern storm and a recipe for dis­as­ter. Luck­ily, Dex has never been one to back down, even when his life –and heart — are on the line.

Come Alive is told from Dex’s POV.

Release date: Some­time in June (I’ll let you know when next month).

Inspi­ra­tion: Like I do with most books, this is named after a song. These lyrics from the Foo Fight­ers “Come Live” really res­onate for me:

Noth­ing more to give

I can finally come alive
Your life into me
I can finally breathe
Come alive

I lay there in the dark
Open my eyes
You saved me the day that you came alive